Quotable: Live Without Explanation

Found in a blog post entitled "Grief, Faith, and Friendship" from The Other Journal. From Christianity, Democracy, and The Radical Ordinary by Romand Coles and Stanley Hauerwas:

"Crucial for me is the presumption that the gospel is a story meant to train us to live without explanation. Explanation presumes that if I can just account for why what happened did happen, then I will be able to live with what has happened… I think Christianity is the training for learning how to live without being in control: you learn to live in the silences, and you learn what the politics* of living in the silences might look like… But to learn patiently in a world where you have no answers, it seems to me, gives you political alternatives that otherwise would not exist—through hope… I assume that God will show up in all different kinds of ways. That’s how I try to conceive of what it means to live hopefully without explanation. You don’t try to explain the death of a child. That will kill you. That will kill you."

I exert so much energy asking "Why?" and trying to fix things or heal things. I am a compulsive systems thinker and an omnivoracious reader, so accounting for 'why' is not usually the problem, at least not on a practical level. The problem is that the answers I find are often harder to live with than the initial questions. There's no good reason for famine, for AIDS, for slavery, for poisoned water and air, for food and medicine that sicken rather than nourishing and healing, for a financial system that gives bailouts to bankers while honest people who have worked all their lives lose their homes and land, for expensive machines engineered specifically to kill people who can't fight back. There's just no good reason. Though I could run my mouth for hours about any of the above, the practical explanation demands an existential explanation that eludes human understanding. Take a shot at the existential explanations and you've got two destinations that I can see: mystery (which is another word for faith) or despair.

I am getting better at letting go and at living with unknowns and ambiguity, though if you know me or read this blog very often you know that my morbid curiosity is alive and kicking and I'm still plenty fond of trying to explain. When I forget for even a few minutes that I'm just one small creature, not God, and therefore have no business trying to get my head around the universe, the want of explanation starts tearing me apart. Coles and Hauerwas are right. It will kill you.

Striving is not all bad—I believe that as creatures we are all here to serve a purpose and to do good work with the time, energy, and capacities that are given to us. Fixing and healing is part of that, as is being lovingly present with others in their explanationless grief and unanswerable 'whys,' not turning our back or averting our eyes having concluded ahead of time that God will not show up. Grieving is not all bad, either. If you are alive and paying any amount of attention, you are aware that there are good reasons to grieve. Absence of grief is probably an indication of denial, apathy, or hate, and I'm pretty sure those things are all bad. Faith and love require grieving for the things that grieve God and grieving alongside those God loves, which is everybody.

Hope is not naive optimism or happiness that depends on earplugs and blinders to shut out our neighbors' cries. Hope means standing up in the dark, broken world and proclaiming, "There is something more!" Hope means looking at the world's casualties and certified lost causes, imagining what could happen with a little grace, and rolling up our sleeves to pitch in. Hope means telling resignation to shut up because some of us are trying to make life worth living here. Hope means deciding that even though you can't feed all the children or save all the trees or stop all the wars, you can make a difference for that one, or those two, or three. "Hope," as I wrote in an essay awhile ago, "means living like the Resurrection is true." (I’m not sure I know what that means, either. But I believe it with all of my heart. Most days.)

Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving, gratitude also deserves a mention. On the positive side of 'why', "Why anything?" Why life? Why love? Why friends? Why babies? Why light? Why color? Why flavor? Why beauty? Why music? Why flowers? Why sunsets? Why fire? Why stars? (I could also give you a technical explanation for most of those, which would be missing the point of them entirely.) If there's no reason for anything, and no Reason behind everything that is, why is there so much good? And why does it hurt so much when the good things of this world get damaged or taken away from us? Just as there are always good reasons to grieve, there are always good reasons to celebrate. What are you grateful for? Do you take time to delight in those things often enough? Who are you grateful for? Do you tell them so? Often enough?

Tomorrow as you gather around the table, take** a few moments to grieve with those whose tables are empty or who have empty places at the table. Take the rest of the day to celebrate the abundant goodness that is given to us not by any nation-state or because we deserve it, but by the mystery of provision through the goodness of God's creation. Celebrate and hope.

Endnotes:
*'Politics' as Hauerwas and others use the term means a lot more than American presidential elections and red-state/blue-state ideological categories. Politics in this sense includes anything having to do with the ordering and governance of human society, from friendships and households to local churches to the nation-state to the whole planet.

**With all due gratitude for the rich vocabulary of my native language, I am becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the selection of verbs relating to time. 'Taking', 'making', 'spending', 'managing', and 'saving' none feel right.

Thanksgiving Prayer

God our Provider,

The abundance we are born to is both a great gift and a sobering responsibility. In your mercy, grant us the ability to be grateful but not complacent. May our consciences be troubled by the ways in which our actions and inactions contribute to the suffering of others. May we have reverent compassion for all of humanity regardless of nationality or station in life, as we are all made from the same dust and even 'the least of these' bears the image of God. May we learn how to better hold our possessions lightly, give generously of our time, humbly understand our place in the unfolding story of the Kingdom, and steward God's good creation on behalf of all life. May we use our privilege and opportunities as means of blessing others rather than to serve ourselves.

Amen.

The Emperor is Naked: An Exposé

If you have taken an economics class, you may remember that there are forces called supply and demand, that one of these drives the other (economists disagree as to which—hence classical supply-side economics and Keynesian demand-side),* that the collective free will of rational people acting in self-interest is sufficient (even ideal) regulation of market forces, that left mostly to its own devices the economy will keep growing indefinitely, and that the distribution of resources resulting from this arrangement (a.k.a. The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace) is the best possible scenario for the well-being of the human race. This is how capitalism works.

But does capitalism work? Really? If by ‘working’ one means serving the purposes it claims to serve and functioning without significant glitches, supporting evidence is questionable at best. Use your own eyes and brains, people. This fancy outfit may not be quite what the tailors promised.

EARTH-SIDE ECONOMICS

Principle #1: Demand does not cause supply. You can’t buy it if it isn’t there. This is obvious.

Principle #2: Supply does not cause demand. The advertising industry, mimetic desire (formation by imitation), and bodily appetites (healthy and otherwise) do that. ‘Growing’ demand requires cultivating consumer insecurity and dissatisfaction or encouraging helpless dependence on manufactured conveniences or counterfeits for the meeting of legitimate needs. This is deplorable.

Principle #3: Demand is not the same thing as need (or even want). Both need and want become ‘demand’ only when they have buying power (money or credit) to back them up. If you don't have buying power, you don't get to demand anything. And most consumers demand (read: buy) things they don’t need (and really, let’s be honest, often don’t want—how big is your storage space? when is the last time you used that?). Then they neglect to demand what they do need and want (‘demand’ requires putting your money where your mouth is—remember, in this system what you buy counts infinitely more than what you say). This is absurd.

Principle #4: Capitalism’s accounting theory is bullshit.** Economic ‘growth’ measures how fast money is changing hands. Nobody is adding what of any goodness or lasting value gets created or subtracting anything, however priceless and irreplaceable, that gets destroyed. This is insane.

Principle #5: The global financial system is a pyramid scheme.*** When the source (buy-in plus buying power) dries up, the siphon fails and whoever got sucked in during the final stages comes up empty. The people at the top get away with a fortune and the people at the bottom get screwed. This is a crime.

Principle #6: Everything comes from somewhere. Wealth is not so much ‘made’ as it is taken away from someplace, rearranged, and deposited someplace else. The trade of commodities allows for a small percentage of the world’s population to control and profit from distribution of the substances on which all current and future residents of the planet depend for sustenance. (The handful of corporations dominating the food system are not so much feeding the world as they are owning the world’s food supply. And now people are working on owning the water.) Whether there will be enough tomorrow is beside the point.**** What counts, as far as the ‘owners’ are concerned, is how much something can be sold for, now. Scarcity is good for business. The less there is to go around, the better to get away with price-gouging, my dear. This is: a) waste, b) theft, and c) murder.

Principle #7: Private ownership and ‘development’ of land (or private enterprise conducted on public land) is a temporary cause of a permanent problem. Our culture deems this a legal and even sacred ‘right.’ People are financially rewarded for drastically reducing the capacity of land to offer anything of value (monetary or otherwise) to future residents. Killing individual plants and animals is not the problem here; this is natural and necessary. The real violence is breaking the circle and making it a line, killing the systems that allow for the renewal of life. (Example: 100 years ago, Africa had plenty of topsoil, forests, and clean drinking water—wells, springs, lakes, and rivers. War, famine, and disease were sporadic smash-and-grab intruders, not a tyrannical occupying force, until European colonists and post-colonial ‘globalization’ got involved and raped the continent within an inch of its life.)***** This is genocide.

Principle #8: People are not rational. Or perhaps more accurately, human reason, being limited and corrupt, allows people to rationalize all sort of things that don’t make sense. What capitalism calls ‘self-interest’ may turn out to be merely greed. If self-interest includes such things as contentment and health, not to mention survival, greed-based economics are actually counterproductive to self-interest. This is irony.

Principle #9: Progress is a myth. In the name of ‘progress’ we have built a machine that is too complicated and powerful for humans to control, and now it is running away with us. Our collective presumptuous effort to beat nature and overcome mortality has succeeded only in setting us up to succumb violently to the inexorable requirements of both. Our strength is our weakness. Our greatness is our downfall. This is tragedy.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY

Economic ‘growth’ as traditionally understood is incompatible with the health and stability of the ecosphere (i.e., the planet-wide physiology in which all biological, chemical, geological, and atmospheric systems are connected). Pursuit of the former at the expense of the latter is the ultimate example of what behavioral psychologists call ‘the error of escalating commitment’: redoubling one’s efforts at any endeavor to prove that it was never a bad idea in the first place. Humans do not have the luxury of naming the terms or the schedule on which we respond to the ecological crisis. We will learn to cooperate with the conditions for the health and survival of the systems on which we depend, or we will not survive.

The ‘health’ of the present financial system is a function of how fast the military-industrial-agribusiness-pharmaceutical-insurance-real/estate complex is running; ‘growth’ (read: running faster than it was running the previous quarter) inevitably worsens the illness and hastens the death of the planet. The Economy as we know it will stop one way or another. It remains for us to determine what sort of communities (people, relationships, and economic arrangements) will be in place when it does. The sooner we move to make substantive changes towards sustainable infrastructure, the more slowly non-renewable resources will dwindle and the more time we have to further adjust.

It would be delusionally optimistic to pretend that we can put Humpty-Dumpty back together again as if none of this had ever happened; there are deep scars that will fade only after millennia of geological activity, and some consequences (e.g. water pollution and species extinction) will remain as long as the Earth and Time endure. It is too late even to talk of turning the ship around. A good number of watch-women and -men saw the iceberg clearly in the 70’s. Some detected it sooner. They sounded the alarm. Our captains responded by not only staying the course but accelerating. Now there are a few billion steerage-class passengers locked in the hold with icewater up to their nostrils, and there may not be enough lifeboats even for the more privileged folks on board.

It’s NOT easy being ‘green.’ “Anyone who says differently is selling something.”****** I’ve been paying attention to and gradually realizing and coming to terms with this ecological crisis stuff for over half of my thirty years. I’ve known what ‘sustainable development’ was and why it mattered since the mid-90’s when I was in high school. Still, living it, putting my money where my mouth is, will require skills I don’t have and sacrifices I am not prepared to make on my own. I need help—mentors, companions, followers, friends. Any successful ecosphere triage efforts will require widespread commitment to humility, wisdom, courage, imagination, hard work, good work, goodwill, interdependence, and radical departure from comfortable conventions, maybe more than our society is prepared to muster. We don’t know for sure how or whether it will work but we must try. We are beginning to see what will happen if we don’t.

Endnotes:
* As with any good false dichotomy, the notions of supply-side and demand-side are presented as opposites and the only two alternatives, ruling out the possibility of other paradigms compared to which the asserted either/or options look like different flavors of the same thing.

** Apologies to sensitive readers. According to theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, in some cases ‘bullshit’ is a technical term. In this case I believe I am actually putting the matter politely.

*** Remember the Enron scandal? Putting ‘hypothetical future value’ on the books as an asset and keeping such complicated ledgers that to the untrained (or mis-trained) eye everything adds up? Lay, Skilling, and friends can’t even pride themselves on originality in fraud. Their corporation just internalized what the whole rest of The Economy already does. (Remember the Enron scandal? Haven’t we learned anything?)

**** Sure people sometimes do horrible things for cruelty’s sake alone, but in general if you want to stay on the trail of blood, just follow the money. Some guy named Jesus said that, “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” Maybe he actually meant it.

***** Nowhere is it written that God loves North America more than (s)he loves any other continent. Anything that can happen anywhere can happen here.

****** The Princess Bride has an insightful if sometimes obnoxious remark for just about any occasion.

Quotable: Given Broken Blessed and Shared

Highlights from my personal best-of-Wendell-Berry collection--the literary version of a deserted island mix CD. Be challenged and and moved. Peace.

__________

I think

an economy should be based

on thrift, on taking care of things, not on theft,

usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.

My purpose is a language that can make us whole,

Though mortal, ignorant, and small.

. . . We

Who do not own ourselves, being free,

own by theft what belongs to God,

to the living world, and equally

to us all.

– WB, from “Some Further Words,” Given: Poems

__________

It is not necessary to have recourse to statistics to see that the human estate is declining with the estate of nature, and that the corruption of the body is the corruption of the soul . . . And it is clear to anyone who looks carefully at any crowd that we are wasting our bodies exactly as we are wasting our land. Our bodies are fat, weak, joyless, sickly, ugly, the virtual prey of the manufacturers of medicine and cosmetics. Our bodies have become marginal; they are growing useless like our “marginal” land because we have less and less use for them. After the games and idle flourishes of modern youth, we use them only as shipping cartons to transport our brains and our few employable muscles back and forth to work.

– WB, “The Body and the Earth,” The Art of the Commonplace

__________

Out of this contempt for work arose the idea of a nigger: at first some person, and later some thing, to be used to relieve us of the burden of work. If we began by making niggers of people, we have ended by making a nigger of the world. We have taken the irreplaceable materials and energies of the world and turned them into jimcrack “labor-saving devices.” We have made of the rivers and oceans and winds niggers to carry away our refuse, which we think we are too good to dispose of decently ourselves. And in doing this to the world that is our common heritage and bond, we have returned to making niggers of people: we have become each other’s niggers.

– WB, “The Unsettling of America,” The Art of the Commonplace

__________

Having witnessed and abetted the dismemberment of the households, both human and natural, by which we have our being as creatures of God, as living souls, and having made light of the great feast and festival of Creation to which we were bidden as living souls, the modern church presumes to be able to save the soul as an eternal piece of private property. It presumes moreover to save the souls of people in other countries and religious traditions, who are often saner and more religious than we are.

– WB, “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” The Art of the Commonplace

__________

To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.

– WB, “The Gift of Good Land,” The Art of the Commonplace

__________

But won’t you be ashamed

To count the passing year

At its mere cost, your debt

Inevitably paid?

For every year is costly,

As you know well. Nothing

Is given that is not

Taken, and nothing taken

That was not first a gift.

– WB, from “Sabbaths 1998:VI,” Given: Poems